An end to the hassle with third party application updates

“Centero’s product is perfect for automatizing routine updates.”

Pohjoisen Keski-Suomen Verkkopalvelut Oy is a municipality-owned company that owns and maintains a regional network in Central Finland. The company also offers a variety of IT support services to its customers.

Municipalities needed to automatize the routine updates for the third party applications on their workstations. Their solution was to start using Centero Software Manager.

Kimmo Sutinen (Pihtiputaa municipality) explains: “We had a need for a centralized system for installing and updating basic software. Centero offered a product that was perfect for us.”

Update automation is a huge time saver

Companies, public organizations, and municipalities are nowadays constantly striving to cut costs, and some of these costs can be eliminated by automating routine tasks that used to call for manual labor.

Widely used and often updated third party applications can cause problems in workstation environments. Cyber criminals are interested in these applications, precisely because of their wide use. These criminals are searching for vulnerabilities that can be used for spreading malware or taking over workstations for criminal intents. Once these shady operators have found vulnerabilities, the software vendors release a version update with a fix to the vulnerability. What this endless race means is that a single application can need dozens of security updates in just one year.

Marko Risunen (Kannonkoski municipality) refers to this same race when talking about their situation: “Users’ software has to be up to date, and the IT staff members don’t have time to tour the field updating it.”

Kimmo Sutinen continues: “The number of software updates is so high that we simply don’t have enough resources for constantly monitoring and installing them.”

“Every IT administrator can do the math: how long does it take to pack the applications and distribute them to workstations using a distribution system, never mind manually. It can be up to dozens of hours every month, depending, of course, on the number of used applications and how well you aim to keep them up to date. Unfortunately, this is where you often end up making risky compromises when it comes to cyber security and updates. Centero Software Manager automatizes the entire process, thereby saving a huge amount of working time while at the same time keeping the cyber security at the best possible level”, explains Teemu Tiainen, head of customer relations at Centero Oy.

Fast and reliable implementation

Centero Software Manager can be integrated with Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or Windows Server Update Service (WSUS), as we did with Pohjoisen Keski-Suomen verkkopalvelut. For each application, we can define a distribution process to meet the needs of the client organization, including pilot, test, and mass distribution.

As Kimmo told us, “the system installation was fast and the updates were ready for distribution immediately. We met the goal almost instantly. There’s no need for monitoring; we can just count on it to run in the background.”

Both of these gentlemen feel that Centero Software Manager suits other organizations as well: “I can recommend it for both public services and companies. Reliable, fast, a solution for the software maintenance problems of today”, Kimmo praises the service.

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Napa Oy is a Finnish software house, operating globally within maritime industry, and it provides solutions to both ship design and safe and effective ship operations. The company is a world leader in the field, and its biggest clients include shipyards, engineering agencies, and shipping companies.